In the second part of Tom Rolander’s conversations with us about early computer industry history we head to a restaurant in Pacific Grove (near Monterey, CA) and hear more stories about industry history. Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of Activewords, gets involved too along with Mrinal Desai, VP of Sales and business development at Crossloop, Tom’s new company.

Tom was Gary Kildall’s best friend and flying partner and had a front-row seat during the early part of the personal computer industry (Kildall was the inventor of CPM which was the operating system that IBM was interested in for its then new PC).

Tomorrow the third and final part of our conversations will be up. There we’ll take a walk around historic buildings of Pacific Grove (just a few miles from Monterey Bay Aquarium) and he’ll tell us more stories of now-defunct Digital Research.

We also just uploaded the video of CrossLoop which is a free product that lets you help other people out with their computer problems. This is Tom’s new company.

Larry Magid reports from Apple’s press conference earlier this week. Larry is someone I’ve been following for a very long time. He does tech reporting for CBS news and now is working for PodTech as part of our new “TechOne” brand. I’m honored to have been his camera guy at the Apple event. If you haven’t seen “skimming” in iMovie yet you might watch this short video that Magid did.

I am having breakfast with some incredible people. We’re in Alvy Ray Smith’s house. He’s the co-founder of Pixar. But today I just had a conversation with Elliot Soloway, professor of computer science at the University of Michigan.

One of his more famous students? Larry Page, co founder of Google.

We have a discussion about how education is changing. I put the whole conversation up on my Kyte.tv channel. It’s in two parts, so you’ll have to watch the second one first.

[kyte.tv 6118]